The Sustainable Agriculture Project or Sus-Ag is a collaboration between LEAF, Sustainable Food Trust and Hummingbird Technologies to create a new digital self-assessment tool for measuring on-farm sustainability, using LEAF's Integrated Farm Management system and the SFT's harmonised framework of metrics for data collection. Hummingbird will be the technical lead on the project and will construct the tool, prioritising three key elements in the process:

1. Automation / integration - Linking the user's existing Farm Management Software (FMS) to the tool. This avoids manual inputs and the duplication of data collection and storage. A wealth of data required for sustainability assessments already sits in a digital form. Therefore building a tool that can automatically 'pull' this information is a vital piece in making the user experience easier and therefore driving adoption.
2. Output Display - Creating a dashboard for the outputs of the assessment is key in driving industry adoption and ensuring transparency and ease of interpretation. Using different tools to visualise the results allows the users to intuitively understand where improvements can be made. Hummingbird also plans to link the survey to field and farm geospatial data to use in the farm benchmarking tool.
3. Interrogation - Using historical sustainability data, Hummingbird will build a layer of predictive modelling that lies behind the tool. This will allow users to model 'what if' scenarios and predict the likely outcomes of changes, thus allowing them to take more of an active management approach to sustainability.

The tool will be designed to drive market adoption and offer a contemporary user experience that prioritises technology functionality and offers increased supply chain transparency. Current versions of sustainability self-assessments focus on farmers and retailers, the consortium's desire is to increase that scope to other stakeholders as highlighted below.

Our Users

1. Farmers -- are increasingly looking to farm more sustainably using existing data to drive continuous improvement and evidence their performance. Such a platform would support improved productivity as well as create a visual planning support document to enable farmers to hone their efficiency, plans and environmental performance.
2. Asset managers and Land-owners -- concerned about maintaining and enhancing the value of their assets and want to asses their farms and the performance of their tenants.
3. Insurance Companies and Banks -- concerned about understanding the profile of risk associated with farm operations.
4. Food manufacturing companies and Retailers -- wishing to protect their relationship (brand value) and give assurance of 'best practice' in procurement to consumers.
5. Government and Regulators -- seeking to fulfil policy objectives, evidencing 'public money for public goods', meeting Carbon Net Zero targets, SDGs and so forth.
6. Other Corporates -- wishing to be associated with sustainable farming to demonstrate the delivery of their environmental and social goals.